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Near-absence of surface zooplankton and pervasive anthropogenic particles along a zonal North Atlantic transect: a multi-vessel citizen-science image survey
Summary
Sailors crossing a huge stretch of the North Atlantic Ocean found almost no tiny ocean animals (zooplankton) in surface waters — but plenty of soot, microplastic, and synthetic fibers instead. This matters because these tiny critters and the thin natural film they help maintain play a role in ocean health, water evaporation, and cloud formation, meaning pollution might be messing with climate systems in ways we haven't fully accounted for — not just CO2 emissions. The findings also hint that the surface layer of the ocean, where a lot of marine life starts out, may be increasingly hostile and loaded
Abstract. Climate policy treats carbon dioxide as the single lever on the climate. We suggest a second one has been overlooked: the marine biodiversity that builds and maintains the ocean surface microlayer (SML) and that pollution is now degrading. Water vapour, not CO₂, is the largest single contributor to the natural greenhouse effect and the strongest feedback on warming. The ocean supplies most of that vapour across the 71% of the planet it covers, and the thin biogenic lipid-and-surfactant film phytoplankton spread over the sea surface helps govern how readily it evaporates and forms aerosol. That same film gathers lipophilic "forever" chemicals, together with the microplastic and black-carbon soot they cling to, to levels far above the water beneath, where they turn toxic to the plankton that hold the ecosystem together. An automated image pipeline sized and classified 51,547 particles larger than 20 μm in 352 georeferenced surface samples from eight sailing vessels crossing the trade-wind North Atlantic. Zooplankton were absent from 93.8% of stations. Black carbon appeared at 89.8%, microplastic particles at 69.9%, microfibres at 22.4% and phytoplankton at 81.8%; 99.2% of everything counted measured below 200 μm. A separate 110-image, GPS-tagged crossing returned zero zooplankton at every point on the track, and a plankton net towed at the surface by day and by night confirmed the scarcity directly, returning roughly 0.2 to 0.5 animals per cubic metre – far below any productive ocean. In short, this surface layer is stripped of animal plankton and steeped in combustion and plastic residue. We trace what that may mean for the microlayer, for water-vapour feedback and cloud formation, and for ocean pH, and argue that cutting pollution has to sit beside cutting carbon.